There would seem little more to be said on this subject, yet in a relatively short book - Sebastian Haffner manages to say a good deal. Without being tritely "revisionist", he takes a commonsense, factual approach rather than an emotional moralistic one. The inherent weakness of the Weimar Republic and the strength of right wing conservatism which had weakened it further, the unarguable success of Hitler's economic policies in the 1930s, the roots of his anti Semitism which resembled East European attitudes rather than German ones, his swift dismantling of the existing machinery of state which gave him absolute power without any legal or political brakes these are all brought out in clear focus. His invasion of Russia, of course, was his climactic blunder but he committed one of equal magnitude in courting war with the United States, a country against which he could never strike effectively. Haffner shows that Hitler was in no sense a "typical German" (or, for that matter, a typical Austrian) but a phenomenon sui generis, and that ultimately he cared nothing ford the German people except as an instrument for his own abnormal ambitions. Interestingly, and surely correctly, he also says flatly that "nothing is more misleading then to call Hitler a Fascist . . . He was not a class politician, and his National Socialism was anything but Fascism," He was, in fact, far closer to Stalin than he ever was to Mussolini.